On-line business transactions are growing at a phenomenal rate. A wide range of products and services are now being offered for sale to consumers by businesses over the Internet. These business-to-consumer (B2C) companies have web sites where consumers can browse, order, and pay for products (e.g., books, CDs, toys, clothes, etc.) and services (e.g., electronic banking, stock trading, etc.), all of which are conducted electronically via the Internet. Furthermore, exchanges for facilitating business-to-business (B2B) transactions are becoming quite popular. The primary attraction and allure of conducting business on-line lies in its potential for enabling a large number of highly automated transactions to be conducted on a regular basis with multiple customers and/or trading partners at low cost. Ideally, the on-line model attempts to eliminate any form of human interaction in order to reduce costs while, at the same time, increasing the speed and efficiency of executing those transactions.
Unfortunately, however, on-line business transactions are error-prone. Human mistakes, software bugs, network/transmission failures, etc. can cause a transaction to fail. The downside is that on-line transactions, by their very nature, cannot be guaranteed to have been successfully completed. There will always be some small percentage of business transactions which will fail.
Failures can severely degrade the reputation and goodwill of these B2C and B2B companies. For B2C businesses struggling to establish a web presence and build an on-line brand, failures can seriously jeopardize their operations. Irate consumers can readily shop at a different site or abandon on-line purchasing altogether. For B2B exchanges, millions of dollars of goods and materials can be hung up several days due to a minor error. And given that many companies operate on a just-in-time inventory scheme, a delay in the shipment of millions of dollars of parts can dramatically effect their manufacturing process and overall profitability.
In an effort to minimize the damage caused by transaction failures, many B2C businesses and B2B exchanges have established call centers. These call centers are staffed with people whose task is to handle incoming calls from customers or purchasers with complaints. Generally, if a customer is dissatisfied with their on-line transaction, they can call a toll free number to speak with a human operator who helps remediate any problems with a customer's on-line transaction which may have occurred. The primary role of call centers today is to handle inbound calls that originate from disgruntled customers who dial in to the call center through a pre-defined phone number.
Although call centers do help ameliorate problems to a certain degree, they suffer several major deficiencies. Namely, the damage has already been done because the customer is already dissatisfied with the failed transaction. Furthermore, a customer may be put on hold or receive a busy signal and cannot even get through to the call center. This aggravates the customer's level of frustration even more so. In addition, a customer can, at best, be only identified via their phone number or a customer identification number after a database lookup. Consequently, the call center representative has little or no knowledge about the customer, the transaction at issue, or the reason(s) for their call. It is up to the customer then to explain their problem to the call center representative. Often, the call center representative cannot address the problem right away and must research the problem and call the customer back at a later time. Sometimes, the call center representative must obtain authorization from a manager before they are able to take the steps necessary to fix the problem.
Thus, there is a need in the prior art for improvements in existing call center technology for handling B2C and B2B markets. The present invention provides a unique, novel solution which overcomes the shortcomings of today's call centers.